Theme and Objectives

Championing Public Health Nutrition is CSPI’s effort to convene first-rate experts, key policy-makers, insightful journalists, and health advocates from across Canada and around the world to scope-out a paradigm shift to help take Canadian policy-makers from aimless public hand-wringing, to implementing a set of sensible, concrete policy solutions. Attendees will examine proposals to strengthen school nutrition standards, nutrition information on labels and menus, food taxes, marketing to children, reformulating foods to minimize added salt and harmful fats, and much more.

Just some of the confirmed speakers for Championing Public Health Nutrition include:

NEW - Mr. Stephen Lewis, Professor in Global Health, Faculty of Social Sciences, McMaster University and former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa

Dr. Walter Willett, Chair, Department of Nutrition, and Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health

Dr. Mary L. McKenna, Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of New Brunswick, and Nutrition Consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO) on its Global Framework on School Health

Ms. Shari Graydon, Author of Made You Look– How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know, Director, Media Action, and former Press Secretary for, then Premier of British Columbia, the Hon. Ujjal Dosanjh

Join us October 22-23, 2008, in Ottawa, to help stimulate some solutions. Championing Public Health Nutrition is a "must-attend" for federal, provincial or municipal policy-makers, health researchers, health journalists, nutrition-promoters, child and health advocates, educators, and anyone concerned about the diets of Canadians!

Background: Diet-related chronic diseases may be the biggest avoidable threats to the health of Canadians and the sustainability of Medicare. Every year, diet-related heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain cancers prematurely kill tens of thousands of Canadians, disable thousands more, and saddle the national economy with billions of dollars in health care costs and productivity losses. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Health even concluded that record high rates of childhood obesity alone may condemn this generation of children to live shorter, sicker lives than their parents.

In recent years, the World Health Organization, federal and provincial ministers of health, and a growing legion of health charities (including the Chronic Disease Prevention Alliance of Canada), and local health advocates have begun to turn the public’s attention toward preventing these major, preventable causes of death and disability. But, the pursuit of concrete policy solutions has been resisted by a stubborn, institutional preoccupation with the repair-shop model of health protection (treatment), disorganization within civil society and some sectors of the food industry selling healthy food, and widespread institutional inertia. Likewise, commercially-motivated resistance to change in some powerful quarters of the food and media industries, and a paucity of decisive high-level political leadership have also impeded reforms that could benefit all Canadians.